Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1200 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing - especially in the year-end summaries (see links in right sidebar.)

There is a detailedIndexarranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the page. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

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18 April 2008

Daly has a B.A from The College of Saint Rose, an M.A. from The Catholic University of America, a Ph.D. in religion from St Mary’s College, Indiana, and PhDs in sacred theology and philosophy from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland (no US Catholic university would permit a woman to do this last degree in the 1960s).

She was hired at Boston College in 1967, and would have been terminated after one year following publication of her book The Church and the Second Sex, which was critical of the Catholic Church. However demonstrations by the then all-male student body resulted in her getting tenure instead.

In the late 1970s Daly was the dissertation advisor to Janice Raymond (whose dissertation became The Transsexual Empire, 1979), and it is rumoured that they were lovers. At the same time she was writing Gyn/Ecology, and both books quote the other.

Daly describes Jesus as: 'androcracy's Absolute Androgyne ... male femininity incarnate'. This is as part of a rejection of male Christianity. On androgyny she writes: 'Experience proved that this word, which we now recognize as expressing pseudowholeness in its combination of distorted gender descriptions, failed and betrayed our thought.' 'Androgyny is a vacuous term which not only fails to represent the richness of be-ing. It also functions as a vacuum that sucks its spellbound victims into itself.'

On transsexualism she parallels Raymond, using words like mutilation, and compares sex reassignment to African clitorectomy. She dismisses female-to-males as tokens and regards male-to-females as non-women in that they cannot menstruate, lack clitorises, cannot give birth, require continual hormone fixes, and are without female history.

She popularized the claim that 9,000,000 people perished in the witch crazes of early modern Europe, a number that has no basis in research. She has also been criticized for ignoring the experiences of non-white women.

In later years Daly refused to admit male students to some of her classes at Boston College on the pretense that their presence would inhibit discussion. The College reprimanded her in that her discrimination was in violation of US law and the College’s own non-discrimination policies. In 1998 two male students, backed by a conservative advocacy group, sued the college on this issue, and she was further reprimanded. She absented herself rather than admit the male students, and the College removed her tenure. She attempted to sue for violation of tenure but her injunction was denied. This became a de-facto retirement.

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Announcement re year-end review

At the end of each year from 2008 to 2015 I did a year-end review of trans persons and events around the world. Each year it became bigger, and it has really become too big a task for one person. I hereby give notice that I will not be doing such a year-end review this year, or in future.

I will do some bits, especially the list of new books, but not the comprehensive survey that I have previously done.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 44 years.